Words kept saying what clerks knew how to write. Words never
said enough.

It worked that way in Michoacán in 1829, when
Juan José Codallos issued his pronunciamiento in favor of
a federalist political system. But what did "federalism" mean in
the defense of indigenous people?

And it worked that way in Lower Canada, when people turned out to support
the Ninety-two Resolutions of 1834: against British rule through
the appointive Legislative Council, for voter control through the elective
House of Assembly, for better French representation in government appointments
-- all stated in 25 pages of legalistic detail. The leader of this
"Patriot:" movement was Louis-Joseph Papineau -- lawyer, liberal,
French, lawyer.

But there were other ways to say what people meant. In 1837, when
communities throughout Lower Canada were holding "anti-coercion" meetings,
to support the Patriot leaders, the government demanded that all officials
support moves to ban these "seditious" meetings. Many officials refused.
Some did not. Local people insisted that all in the community
stand with them -- not just in formal meetings, but as part of daily life.
The some who did not were often English-speaking.

French-speaking locals then used country techniques of shame
and boycott going back to peasant communities on the other side of the
Atlantic. A stubborn farmer would discover one morning that night
visitors had clipped the manes and tails of his horses. Others found
that no one would perform, for them, the jobs that were part of neighborly
exchange. Threats came, to burn barns and houses, and the burnings
sometimes happened.

Conflict escalated beyond the picturesque. Within a year, communities
in Lower Canada were generating militant resistance groups -- the Chasseursor Hunters' lodges. These extensions from the community were
in a position to make, or refuse, connections to the outside world.

That outside was sometimes close at hand. At Kahnawake
there was an Iroquois settlement, known to have a small store of arms,
including cannon. A delegation of Hunters went to ask that the settlement
remain neutral during the struggle between Crown and Patriots. When
they also asked the Iroquois turn over the arms to them, they seemed unaware
that the request would cause alarm. Instead, the Kahnawake leaders
arranged a bloodless ambush, and turned the whole delegation over to British
authorities.

Peasant resistance there was, and a reaching toward something beyond.
But what would that reaching connect to?

Liberals or Peasants?

To middle-class liberals, both French- and English-speaking, the Canadas
in 1830 looked like Spanish America in 1810. The lower Houses of
Assembly were elected, but not the upper "Legislative Councils."
A favored group office-holders made up the so-called "Family Compact,"
like oligarchic groups in Spanish America, before and after Independence.

Outside these groups, a growing movement of business men and landowners
was demanding wider controls over government. The cause was popular.
Leaders were recruiting support for their political demands, among the
peasants of French Canada and the small farmers of English Canada.

But the government had support, too:

--within Lower Canada, especially from the clergy, who opposed
all revolution, and from non-French groups who feared the empowering of
a French majority
-- within Upper Canada, from all those groups who saw British power
as a protection against the U.S. presence looming from the south.

Up to a point, economic divisions ran along similar lines. Politicians
in Britain were sponsoring the British American Land Company, giving it
large grants to colonize immigrants in Canada -- much like the grants
that liberal governments in Central America were offering to outside companies.
Even if liberal leaders in Canada saw those grants as an act of aristocratic
privilege, they were themselves landowners and investors, who would hardly
fight private property titles, once granted. Some of them in French
Canada held "seigneuries" -- the right to collect perpetual dues
and rents from land that their predecessors had "sold" to peasants.
Some were trying to transform the seigneuries into modern private property,
on which they could increase the rents.

These outside or antique privileges were an obstacle at a time when
rural populations in eastern Canada were outgrowing the land they could
give to their children.

In Lower Canada, peasants wanted more than just freedom from Crown political
control. They wanted to block rent increases, or restrict their economic
obligations to the Church, or keep outsiders from coming in and taking
up land. Some of the local tradesmen who supported the peasants were
English-speaking, but more and more, when peasants threatened to harass
people who did not support their cause, these threats set French-speaking
against English-speaking. Those threatened sought protection, the
government began to mobilize militia units to provide it, the dissidents
organized their own units in response, and the class polarization, now
increasingly "racial," took on military form. As conflict became
harsh and dangerous, some of the wealthier, more cautious French leaders,
such as Papineau, pulled away from the movement.

Battle and Repression

The fighting came in three waves.

First, political clubs on both the liberal and the anti-liberal sides --
the Sons of Liberty and the Doric Club -- adopted paramilitary, secret
methods, mounting street fights and reprisals.

Second, in 1837, military units moved in to arrest radical leaders, while
radicals fought to rescue these leaders or to block government forces along
roads and in town squares. The military won. Despite the Loyalists
who called for hangings, the government so far imposed no punishments more
severe than exile.

The following year, the radicals came back with a new organization, more
elaborate, based eventually in a secret, oath-bound paramilitary organization
of "Hunters" (Chasseurs), who relied on safe havens across the border
in Vermont and New York. The militia, backed by regular army units,
moved in again, this time using counterinsurgency techniques visibly like
those Napoleon had used in Spain, or that Spanish royalist forces had mounted
in insurgent Mexico. This meant not only combat, but systematic reprisals
against the French population, the detention of many French Canadians who
looked guilty, and finally the hanging of twelve rebel leaders, after military
trials in which no jury was impaneled.

At the climax of the conflict, as the government forces were winning, the
Hunters hoped to escalate their violation of U.S. neutrality laws, provoke
U.S. sympathy and war with Britain, and thus create the conditions in which
the popular forces in Canada could win their goals. At the same time that
radicals were moving beyond the conservative Papineau, some of them were
making wild promises of an invasion from the U.S.

In the United States, along the northern border, sympathizing adventurers
were joined by opportunistic thugs to stage raids over the line.
As individuals, they resembled nothing quite so much as the poorly disciplined
adventurers, based in New Orleans and then within the Texas Republic, who
fed the aggressiveness of Texas policies against Mexicans and Comanches.
They showed little interest in the differences between peasant rebellion
in Lower Canada and petty liberal demonstrations in Upper Canada.

While the Hunters could rouse verbal grandstanding from politicians
in New York and other border states, they never got any help from the U.S.
Army or from mainstream politicians in the United States. Washington
adhered to its own neutrality laws, and more seriously than it did on the
Mexican border. This non-coercive liberal stance worked in silent alliance
with the conservative, coercive policies of Canadian authority.

British and Canadian authorities met the rebellions on a broad scale.
Along the border, they struck back at the raiders from the United States,
captured them when they could, and subjected them to the same military
courts as they did domestic rebels. They recruited new loyal militia
units in both Canadas, brought in regular army units from distant posts,
and concentrated the regulars against the resistance in Lower Canada.
By the time the fighting was over, and for some years thereafter, the regular
army presence in Canada was far and away the largest organized military
force anywhere on the continent. (In this it foreshadowed the large
force that Spain was to build up in Cuba in the early 1890s.)

Community Outreach, or Cultural Isolation?

The Chasseurs, with all their civilized lodge-type ritual, were
in the same position as Cheyenne Dog Soldiers or U.S. border ruffians.
They were an off-shoot from an established community, concentrating on
quick resort to armed force, but also acting outward in a way that just
might establish connections to other communities.

They could signal to neighbors. There were also times when signals could
scare people off, which happened when the Chasseurs tried to neutralize
the Iroquois at Kahnawake. Loyalist forces in Canada had little difficulty
in recruiting companies from among the communities of fugitive slaves who
had found a refuge north of border, or from Iroquois bands who had settled
there.

Intellectually, the rebels of Lower Canada appealed to the examples
of the U.S. and French Revolutions, and even to the possibility getting
help from other Indians and other peoples in resistance. In practice,
they were more isolated. They had little to do with the Native American
population in Canada -- either with the tribes in their own area, or with
those in the West, into whose society French voyageurs had married in the
earlier years of the fur-trade. They had little contact with the
white English-speaking farmers of Upper Canada, or with the communities
of fugitive slaves who had begun to migrate into Canada from the United
States.

If the habitants had maintained a subsistence, non-market economy
on the lands for which they still paid the seigneurs, they would
count as an innocent pre-capitalist community. But they were commercial
farmers. They raised wheat. They could be hurt by fluctuations
in the grain markets. The economic grievances of peasants everywhere
gave them a common identity when wider markets exerted pressure on land-titles
or on commodity prices. This was a common commitment to reacting
against evils.

The habitants had far less share in the community identities
that extended over the continent, bound together at the patches between
one network and another. Such isolation marked also many of the marginal
whites of the United States, so cut off in their racial identity that they
had to accept service in the control networks of their day, if they wanted
to connect up with the larger world at all.

It is not that such groups were defeated because they struggled in isolation.
They might have been defeated anyway. Their isolation was itself
the great defeat.

References:

Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: the Rebellion of 1837 in Rural
Lower Canada (1993)